Lullaby Sent to the Devil
by I.C. Weener
Summary: Separation Anxiety.
1. Stay the Way You Are

" _I see, Priestess of Genbu. You appear to be just like me, wading in a pool of your own death."_

\- Temdan Rowun, Fushigi Yuugi

" _This car is a part of me just as much as it's a part of you."_

\- Joe Astor, Viper

" _How is he these days?"_

" _Peter? Well, he was borderline for a while. Then he crossed the border."_

\- Ghostbusters II

* * *

NERV's top secret Seattle base was a booming place to be on a Friday afternoon. Mari was almost ready to yawn as boot sequence color patterns rapidly flashed across her glasses from the Entry Plug screens. She moved in slow motion as she stretched her shoulders and wiggled life back into her fingers. Her braided brown hair floated in weightless ripples when she turned her head. She'd been stuck in a tank full of breathable apple cider for the past twenty minutes, and she felt like she might start going stale if she didn't see some action soon.

An operator who sounded just as enamored with their job as she was droned through the Entry Plug's speakers.

" _Umbilical power supply in place. LCL amniotic environment stable. Pilot biosigns are all green."_

Mari sighed and vacantly blew bubbles into her liquid oxygen supply.

She wasn't sure why her Plugsuit looked more it passed off better as a bathing suit than any kind of regulatory military equipment. She wasn't exactly planning on an ocean vacation in the middle of a training operation. While she wasn't personally friends with any of Japan's Eva pilots (and they weren't even aware she served alongside them in a separate NERV branch on the opposite side of the planet), she had been keeping tabs on them long enough to know everyone else got to wear proper jumpsuits when they were piloting. Mari must have been the odd one out, because her version of the _regalia mécanique_ took a more piecemeal approach to uniform design. She was wearing metallic pink and blue boots that reached up to her knees, metallic pink and black gloves that reached a little past her elbows, metallic pink bikini bottoms that barely covered up the downtown district, and a metallic pink and black crop top molded with thin plastic shielding and with the designation "04" painted in black army stencils on the front and back.

Whatever the hell "optimizing the ratio of neuralmetric yield by maximizing surface area" was supposed to mean. One of the world's greatest mysteries to her was what Freudian theories and math calculations had to do with how much of her butt cheeks were showing. She just got to pick the color.

Then again, considering she was basically a glorified fetus in this whole "giant robot that isn't really a robot is my mom" setup, she was a little surprised to be wearing anything.

" _We're ready to begin the Activation Test, Lt. Makinami,"_ Boredom McMonotone buzzed over the Evangelion's radio.

"It's about time we got this show on the road." Mari rolled her eyes. A cluster of LCL bubbles swarmed out of her mouth as she sighed in aggravation.

She leaned forward in her cockpit seat and anxiously coiled her fingers around the control throttles. Mari had been little more than NERV's test hamster for the past year, always getting first dibs at playing with the new toys that came out the American and Russian bases and ironing out their bugs before they were shipped off to HQ. If today's operation was a success, she'd have her own Eva that wasn't cobbled together from spare parts and could finally be assigned to the frontlines in Tokyo-3. She'd spend the whole weekend partying with the Seattle crew, once she got the apple cider washed off.

" _Unit 04 online. Synchronization grid is all green. Engaging S2 Engine now."_

The Master of the Mundane finished everything they had to say and flipped the last switch to bring the system online. In hindsight, Mari really wished they hadn't.

The inside of EVA-04's Entry Plug changed to red. The cockpit quaked violently as the words SYNCH FLUX ERROR suddenly filled her screens. The operator finally had an opportunity to express their upper vocal range as they panicked.

" _The psychometer is going off the grid! The Plug won't eject! She's going critical!"_

Then Mari heard the screaming: Hundreds of tinny radio voices blasting through her ear as the entire base vanished in blocks from her radar map. After five seconds of terrifying wails of torment, the voices abruptly cut off and the only thing that came through Mari's radio was deafening static. Her radar map was blank except for a set of longitude-latitude coordinates that couldn't physically exist.

Mari felt the universe plummeting backwards. Her spatial awareness collapsed and suddenly she was in an infinite void of boiling blood-tinted LCL. She flailed her arm up toward her rapidly disappearing world, losing hold of her very existence as a frenzy of invisible quantum sharks dragged her down into the Dirac sea.

* * *

Three months later…

Writhing fungal appendages burst out of the ground behind EVA-03's feet. The unit's left ankle was caught in the foaming reeds before its pilot even noticed.

So far, this Angel was more of a nuisance than an actual challenge for the Evangelion team. It was viral in nature and seemed to be drawn toward any technology it could find. One minute it possessed an electric trolley and sent it hurtling toward the Evas, then it created an artificial lightning storm between some power lines. Nothing it did was enough to faze the Evangelions' armor, and none of the Eva team's physical attacks could harm it in return. In its current state, the Angel was nothing more than a cloud of energy that phased in and out of sight and left a trail of melting cordyceps wherever it passed. The Eva team had to wait until the Angel was done chilling out in subspace and decided to show up in its physical form.

The giant transuniversal sinkhole rapidly expanding behind EVA-03 seemed to be a sign it was finished playing hide and seek.

" _Hikari! Watch out!"_ Asuka screamed over the radio.

EVA-02 tackled into EVA-03 and pushed it to safety across the street. EVA-02 hacked away at the squirming vines reaching through the wormhole with its combat axe, painting the surrounding buildings with bright red gore.

EVA-01 moved toward the left of 02 and 03 with its two-handed Countersword cautiously raised. EVA-00 was stationed two blocks away aiming its sniper rifle.

The void twisted off the ground, gradually imploded on itself, and began to turn solid. The first thing to form was its face: Two menacing blue eyes shielded behind a silver muzzle with four nostrils. The instant it had a mouth, it wrenched open its armored jaws and vomited a wave of corrosive spores toward the NERV team. EVA-03 quickly crouched in front of the rest of the team and protected them with its clear riot shield.

The Angel continued to materialize as the wormhole collapsed around it. It crouched to the ground like a wild animal ready to strike, roaring in madness from its hollow metal mouth. Fully formed, it was a surreal abomination with six arms, four legs (if mangled pillars of flesh, bone, and silver metal could be qualified as "legs"), and a grotesque torso engulfed almost completely by the bloated and tumorous S2 Engine erupting from its ribs. Its severe mutations made the scraps of shattered silver armor grafted to its body almost unrecognizable. The top of its first pair of arms were fitted with only the bent and broken off remnants of its old shoulder pauldrons. Along its back, a white capsule was screwed through the top of its spinal column, hidden deep underneath an overgrown fungus colony with number "04" almost completely worn away.

The Entry Plug was impossible to spot with the naked eye, and none of Eva pilots could detect it with their onboard systems. If they had been able to take a glimpse inside the festering atrocity staring them down, they would have come face to face with one shadowy and mysterious beach babe tangled in alien sea algae and in the mood for some chaos. The long-expired LCL surrounding her swirled with black clouds and obscured her in murkiness, but her revealing two-piece Plugsuit left little room to doubt her physiological state. Her veins were lit up like neon blue roadways traveling over every curve of her body, while her eyes glowed icy cobalt underneath the glare of her glasses. Her darkened female outline sat in the unpowered cockpit like the constellation of an hourglass glowing in the empty black cosmos to herald that humanity's time had run out. And of course, her lips were curled in a smug cat-like smirk.

* * *

NERV HQ was on high alert. The monstrosity of silver metal and inflamed red flesh was scanned through hundreds of automated sensors the instant it was visible on the command center cameras. The Magi System processed the data and returned with an analysis in a matter of seconds. Then the screen flashed with the giant words all of the workers on deck feared the most.

 **[BLOOD TYPE: BLUE]**

The voices of Evangelion team relayed back from the field and boomed through the command center's intercom.

" _What the_ _ **hell**_ _is that thing?"_ Asuka shouted from her cockpit.

" _Yeck,"_ Hikari shuddered. _"Asuka saves me from getting turned into mushroom soup and now we have to fight this weirdo?"_

" _Why does it look like an Eva?"_ Shinji gasped.

" _Why does it have to look like_ _ **mine**_ _?"_ Hikari added.

" _Target locked. Awaiting orders,"_ Rei said stoically.

Gendou was sitting at his desk at the highest tier of the base. His mouth was hidden behind his folded hands, while his eyes were hidden behind the white glow of his glasses. Misato stood near his right shoulder staring out at the screen. Ritsuko was watching closely from his left.

"My God. That's-…" Misato started to gasp, recognizing the disfigured remnants of the creature's original body in an instant.

"An Angel," Ritsuko forcefully completed her sentence, stopping her before she had a chance to say "EVA-04."

The doctor lowered her voice toward Gendou.

"Commander, I highly advise we eradicate all traces of the Thirteenth Angel before the infection spreads."

"Wait! Shouldn't we tell them about Mar-…" Misato objected.

"She doesn't exist. EVA-04 is an unmanned vehicle," Ritsuko sternly asserted.

"You know that's bullshit!" Misato shouted back in anger. "Look at the signals coming in. She's still synchronized with that thing!"

"She's been submerged below the threshold of reality for too long. Whatever came back is no longer human," Ritsuko said with haunting absolute certainty.

"We don't know that for sure!" Misato objected. "We can still try to get her ou-…"

"The Angel is the only thing that's been sustaining her for the past three months. She's become a Whore of Babylon."

Ritsuko turned her head to look Misato straight in the eye and coldly added, " _She's gone."_

* * *

Asuka got sick of waiting for something tubular to happen and decided to hang ten on her own. EVA-02 hurled its axe toward the Angel, where it lobbed halfway through the Angel's shoulder and got stuck in place as the severed muscles twisted and healed around it. EVA-02 used its assault rifle, EVA-03 used its submachine gun, and EVA-00 used its sniper rifle to pummel the monster in a hail of firepower. EVA-01 remained awkwardly frozen in shock.

The Angel hissed and shrieked as the bullets bounced off its armor and tore through its flesh, only to grow back even more mutated when the Evas stopped to reload. EVA-00 pulled a canister grenade out of its right pauldron and tossed it under the Angel's body. The resulting explosion blew off two and a quarter of the Angel's legs, but they instantly grew back in the form of squirming blister-covered cartilage.

The Angel stretched its head forward and screamed again in defiance. It used all four of its legs to instantly launch into the sky and blot out the sun. EVA-02 and EVA-03 looked up from their shade and saw the Angel come crashing back down toward them like a raging ocean wave.

* * *

 _Author's note: Ritsuko's "She's beyond all hope. Kill it" mentality is kinda how I feel about Rebuild in general._

 _Author's note 2: Well boys it looks like we turned this megane-ko into a real mega-neko._

 _Author's note 3: Alternate titles I was considering for this story: "Anything But Tangerines,"_ _ _"New Junk City,"_ "Black Sheep" (the boss theme from Alien Soldier, not the Chris Farley movie), "The Last Soul," and "Aquarius."_

 _Author's note 4: My brain is bouncing back and forth between saying this version of the EVA-04 disaster is a pure accident caused by the Angels being an uncontrollable evil so it plays into the "follies of Man trying to play God" theme, or saying the whole thing is just SEELE being assholes again and they secretly manipulated everything to play out this way while rigging it to look like an accident because their plan was to use Mari as a hyper-modernized sci-fi version of a sacrificial virgin against her will so they could spawn an Angel they can control to some degree to hasten the end of the world and/or set an example to the other NERV insiders. Not sure which one should be canon in this AU._

 _Author note 5: If you're confused on how Bad Mari can be shadowy and glowy at the same time, uh… let me think of a comparison. You know that scene in Sailor Moon R when they start fighting Wise Man and for a split second you see this outline of a dude that looks sorta like a more smoky version of Rubeus? It's a lot like that._


	2. Enchantment Under the Sea

_Author's note: This is a continuation of the first scene in Chapter 1 before the time skip.  
_

* * *

Mari's shining pink heels sank into the silt on the ocean floor. Gravity on this plane of existence was simultaneously intense and non-existent. The water filling the infinite expanse around her was easy to breathe. It was like being submerged in LCL that had been synthesized with a few extra spices in the formula.

The sea floor moved under her feet. The silt turned into dozens of writhing living figures, an army of underwater beings forming out of a single giant entity. As the sea creatures separated, they took the form of glowing fungal matter crudely imitating the contours and musculature of human male bodies. They vaguely looked like they were wearing swim trunks made of protective mushroom latex to keep up with Mari's skimpy oceanic motif. Their heads were giant overgrown mushroom caps, giving them a surreal and alien appearance.

Mari gnashed her fangs and punched one of the sub-dimensional nautical menaces. It didn't go very well. Her fist sank straight through the being's primitive flesh as if it were a punching bag made of melting taffy. She pulled her arm back and tried to kick another one of the creatures away as it rose out of the sentient mass under her feet. All she managed to do was polish her pink boot with a fresh coat of flaky slime.

She started to sink into the fungal colony like it was made of quicksand. The arms of several human-imitation creatures flailed from the sea floor and reached up her legs. They roughly grabbed at the pink and black band around her waist and yanked her Plug-kini bottoms down to her thighs.

"Okay, fine," Mari mumbled in acceptance. She begrudgingly moved her legs to help the creatures pull the pink Unit 4 skivvies over her ankles and off of her feet.

The tiny swimwear hovered weightlessly through the water beside her. Between her boots and her crop top, she was wearing her birthday suit instead of her Plugsuit.

The legion of writhing sea floor beings stared up from underneath Mari like she was a human biology exhibit standing on stage. She couldn't read what they were thinking due to them having large spotted fungus caps in place of faces, but she was pretty sure they had something shady planned for her. Unless the baring of vaginas just happened to be the customary Mushroom Boy way of saying "Hello."

The swim trunks started to slide down as the sea creatures lowered their AT Fields. The junction of Mari's lower body was marked by a small patch of dark brown hair. The junctions of the lower bodies of the semi-human Dirac abominations were marked with complex vibrant swirl patterns. In between their fungus-stalks-trying-to-be-legs, each one sported a pair of swirl-covered bulbs growing underneath a veiny shaft-like formation. Mari had a few guesses where that was supposed to go.

She was stuck up to her knees in fungus growth. Her arms were getting tangled around the constantly shifting bodies of the creatures. As she sank deeper into the living seabed and got closer to the bulb arrangement growing below the waist of one of the beings (specifically, when it was almost in her face), she realized the swirling patterns naturally formed the shape of the letter "S". There was one "S" for each bulb, and two bulbs lining each rigid vented shaft.

S+S = S2.

"You've got to be kidding." Mari rolled her eyes behind her glasses.

Another fungal being formed out of the floor directly behind Mari. Its hands pushed against the large plastic "4" on her backpack and made her bend forward. Its gelatinous waist lined up with the top of her firm hips while she fought off another being stretching its elastic arms around her shoulders and trying to pull her top half headfirst into the sentient quicksand.

"Do what you've gotta do back there," she calmly grumbled over her shoulder. "Just take it easy on the lymph nodes."

The Angel lurched forward and inched its S2 Organ closer toward her hedgehog's dilemma.

* * *

 _"What the **hell** is that thing?"_ Asuka's voice screamed in a distorted reverberating pitch over the Angel's infested comms receiver.

Mari was an alluring and sinster siren lying in wait in the murk of EVA-04's contaminated Entry Plug. Her center of gravity was welded to the cockpit seat with thriving fungus growths as strong as the giant mass blocking her Plug ejection rockets. Densely pulsing fibers of bacteria hugged around her bare hips and came to a junction between her legs, forming a rough construct of mucousy organic bikini bottoms to replace her old synthetic ones.

" _Yeck. A_ _suka saves me from getting turned into mushroom soup and now we have to fight this weirdo?"_ Hikari's voice broadcasted in sounding like she had a severe case of laryngitis. _  
_

Underneath the indestructible fungal netting that protected the Angel's delicate organic structure and Mari's modesty, there were two secret bundles of shapeshifting reeds working as living interface adapters. They were permanently locked inside the two soft cavities along Mari's underside, assuming management of their human biological functions and altering her internal physiology so those vestigial functions were phased out completely. Now the reeds were purely for keeping Angelic energy flowing in and absorbing converted human energy back out. Mari's and the Angel's individual biologies had combined into a single inseparable system.

It wasn't all that bad. Mari found the seating arrangement to be mildly uncomfortable after the Angel's soul had first merged with her consciousness, but she quickly adapted to this new mode of life. And it felt great any time the cockpit was getting rocked around. The webbing acting as her bikini strings would react and grow more resilient if a jolt made her shift out of her seat's biological power couplings too far, but she always had a couple inches of suspension to comfortably shift around. In the lowest of Lilian terms, it wasn't unlike having two malleable vibrating friends paying a permanent visit. If she had been a boy, she would have had to contend with something more in line with a catheter and a colonoscopy tube.

" _Why does it look like an Eva?"_ Shinji's garbled watery voice echoed in Mari's right ear. _  
_

" _Why does it have to look like_ _ **mine**_ _?"_ Hikari whined on the left.

The Angel and Mari coexisted in layers. The outside part of their body were the fungal formations trapping EVA-04's entry hatch and grotesquely mutating its cells. Mari sat inside the Evangelion's cockpit connected to what was left of its piloting systems, and the bacteria around her lap created a connection inside of her. Together they formed a matryoshka doll of infection and assimilation.

 _"Target locked. Awaiting orders,_ " Rei's distorted chipmunk voice echoed directly behind Mari's head.

Mari calmly breathed the flecks of contaminated mold floating in the LCL around her. The aquatic bacteria sweeping from her lungs reacted with the alien energy coursing up from her lap when they both reached her heart, making her icy blood burn blue and making her veins light up like runes on her skin. Her discarded pink Plug bottoms still hovered idly in the water around her with the number "04" printed on their left rear side, serving as a reminder half of her was skinny dipping and there was an abomination happening below her waistline.

Mari leaned forward in her seat and grinned through the cloudy waters with her fangs. The Angel encasing her sprang into its attack.

* * *

 _Author's note 2: Sure beats having your face ripped off while Kaworu's disembodied voice talks to you, I guess._


End file.
